Posted lecture notes, Management 101
- Peter Lorenzi
- Apr 7, 2022
- 3 min read
Posting the first half of my notes for my Loyola Management and Leadership courses, last updates when posted on Moodle in the fall 2018 semester.
If there is one major theme that has come back time and time again during these past two years of pandemic insanity, woeness, cancel culture and the left's revived love for socialism and the extreme re-distribution of wealth, it is this: For most of the history of the world, through multiple, accelerating quantum leaps in technology and travel, wealth has been extracted, appropriated, stolen or otherwise acquired from its source, be in minerals from the ground or people sold into slavery.
A small percentage of people have unimaginable wealth and a small percentage of people live in absolute poverty. Between these two groups lie over seven billion people who have a greater interest in making their own lives better, except perhaps for some virtue signaling, wealth re-distributing elites just outside the top one percent, who feel that having a top one percent is a moral outrage.
Wholly unlike the first 10,000 years, what has changed most precipitously in the past two hundred years has included the following: infant mortality declined by 90% worldwide while life expectancy doubled, inflation-adjusted average per capita incomes globally have increased ten-fold, world population has increased seven-fold, the number of people NOT living in absolute poverty has increased from numerous in the hundred of thousands to several billion, most nature-induced deaths, e.g., cholera, dysentery, yellow fever, malaria, smallpox, tuberculosis, have declined precipitously just as deaths from natural disasters, e.g., fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, droughts, floods, have also declined precipitously, while lifestyle induced deaths, i.e., from drug abuse, obesity, alcohol, smoking, have climbed just as steeply.
The miracle of modern ingenuity has been the capacity to create wealth, and to create in faster than the increase in population. Even "poor" people today, especially those deemed (relatively) "poor" in wealthier countries, live better, longer and more comfortable lives than the wealthiest people in the world two hundred years ago.
The idea that keeps coming back is how we have tried to replace a culture that admires, supports and rewards wealth creation with one that passively if not explicitly endorses and pursues the creation of poverty, primarily by the "poor" having more children and often in households with a single parent. Single-parent households and recent, unskilled immigrant families define the vast majority of poverty in the United States. This has also led to the observation that while the basic driver of poverty in wealthy countries is sex outside of traditional marriage, in less developed countries, poverty is reinforced and continued by sex inside of marriage, i.e., large, poor, two-parent families.
There cent attention to slavery and reparations completely ignores both the history and the current practice of slavery in the world, while propagating illogical claims that later generations of a a small number of those employing slaves have a "moral obligation" to pay reparations to people of the same skin color as some of the slaves held in a single country.
The shift has also been away from hard-earned democracies built on the protection of basic natural, negative rights (i.e., things the government can't do, e.g., can't take away your freedom of speech) rights, to one where people assert claims on the resources of others as a positive right (i.e., resources that taxpayer-based governments must give you), while also rejecting some of the natural, negative rights that's have long characterized democratic countries.
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